Doctoral Dissertation Research: Behavioral and Computational Investigation of Transitivity in the Acquisition of Non-Basic Syntax

博士论文研究：非基本语法习得中及物性的行为和计算研究

基本信息

批准号：
1827709
负责人：
Jeffrey Lidz
金额：
$ 1.57万
依托单位：
University of Maryland, College Park
依托单位国家：
美国
项目类别：
Standard Grant
财政年份：
2018
资助国家：
美国
起止时间：
2018-07-01 至 2020-06-30
项目状态：
已结题

来源：
https://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward?AWD_ID=1827709&HistoricalAwards=false
关键词：
Doctoral Dissertation Research Behavioral Computational

项目摘要

Within the first years of life and without explicit instruction, children acquire a linguistic system that allows them to combine sounds in order to express meanings. Studying this process illuminates how a cognitive system as complicated as language can develop in the human mind, and helps clarify the nature of learning in development. Learning in general requires building on prior knowledge: children can't learn arithmetic if they don't know how to count. This project asks how infants build on their prior linguistic knowledge at each stage of their development, using the limited amount of speech they are able to understand, in order to learn more about the structure of their language. By improving our understanding of how infants learn about their language at each stage in development, the project provides an important step toward understanding why and how the quantity and type of speech heard in infancy contribute to differences in children's later vocabulary and language performance, in school and later in life.This research focuses on the acquisition of "non-basic" clauses as a window into the incremental nature of language learning. Sentences like "What did Mary fix?" are potentially misleading for children in the earliest stages of syntax acquisition, who might not recognize that "what" stands for the object of "fix" and might think that this clause is intransitive. This work pursues the hypothesis that children may use knowledge about verb argument structure in order to identify non-basic clause types in their language. The research integrates approaches from different research communities, using behavioral experiments to investigate the developmental trajectory of non-basic clause acquisition, and computational modelling to evaluate whether the proposed mechanisms are feasible for learning from child-directed speech. Through this case study, this research aims to provide a fuller picture of what portion of the input is useful to an individual child at any single point in development, how children perceive that input given their current grammatical knowledge, and what internal mechanisms enable them to generalize beyond that input in inferring the grammar of their language. The project also includes outreach about issues in language development to local families and high school students from under-represented backgrounds.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.

在生命的头几年，没有明确的指导，孩子们就获得了语言系统，使他们能够结合声音以表达含义。研究这一过程阐明了一种像语言在人类思想中会发展的认知系统，并有助于阐明发展中学习的本质。一般而言，学习需要基于先验知识：如果孩子不知道如何计数，他们就无法学习算术。该项目询问婴儿如何使用他们能够理解的有限言语来建立在他们发展的每个阶段，以便更多地了解其语言结构。通过提高我们对婴儿如何在发展的每个阶段学习语言的理解，该项目为了解婴儿期间听到的语音的数量和类型提供了重要的一步，这会导致儿童后来的词汇和语言表现，在学校和后期生活中的差异。这项研究的重点是“非基础”的“非基础”的范围，以学习语言的学习性。诸如“玛丽修复了什么？”之类的句子？在语法获取的最早阶段，可能对儿童产生误导，他们可能不认识到“固定”对象的“什么”代表“ fix”的对象，并且可能认为该条款是不及物的。这项工作提出了这样的假设：儿童可以使用有关动词论证结构的知识来识别其语言中的非基础子句类型。该研究将来自不同研究社区的方法整合，使用行为实验来研究非基础条款获取的发展轨迹，以及计算建模，以评估提出的机制是否可用于从儿童指导语音中学习。通过此案例研究，该研究旨在更全面地了解输入的哪一部分对个人在发育中的任何点上对个别孩子有用，孩子如何看待他们在当前的语法知识的情况下对输入的看法，以及哪些内部机制使他们能够将其推广到推断其语言语法的输入中超出该输入。该项目还包括有关在代表性不足的背景下向当地家庭和高中生的语言发展问题的推广。该奖项反映了NSF的法定任务，并被认为是值得通过基金会的知识分子优点和更广泛的影响评估标准通过评估来获得支持的。